


here in your arms as i shake

by Babydoll Ria (Babydoll_Ria)



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Odesta Writers' Heartbreak, Odesta Writers' Heartbreak Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 10:16:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3646506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Babydoll_Ria/pseuds/Babydoll%20Ria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She patches his soul, filling him to empty herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here in your arms as i shake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ambpersand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambpersand/gifts), [thewildwilds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewildwilds/gifts), [sabaceanbabe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/gifts), [BeesKnees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeesKnees/gifts).



His voice is like jazz on the radio; it sounds like sex and makes her feel warm and liquidly on the inside so when she rolls over in bed, still naked from the hour before there’s a small smile on her face.

He’s leaning against the wall, shadows in the moonlight holding his head in his hands.

‘What’s on your mind?’ Finnick is beautiful, he’s beautiful in a way that hurts and he’s here with her in her bed, and really that’s all that matters.

‘Everything,’ he tells her mirthlessly.

Finnick is beautiful, he’s beautiful in a way that hurts and sometimes when he is here with her, he’s not here with her at all.

‘Do you want to forget?’ she asks. Annie’s good at making people forget, she’s good at being forgotten. It happens, you know, when people don’t want to remember the girl with the green eyes and the broken expression. Sometimes winners are losers because no one wants to remember they won, and sometimes that’s worse-forgetting.

‘Yeah’ Finnick says with the smile of a martyr and she lowers herself on top of him.

She fills in every crack, every crevice of where he’s empty or numb she presses herself into until all he can feel is her, and all that matters is the way they move. They make eternity in heartbeats, breathe immortality in kisses.

When they are done- bodies slick with sweat and the smell of sex fills the room like perfume- she holds him.

‘Better?’

He whispers _yes_ into her skin, but it feels like no.

* * *

 

Johanna Mason is tall. There a million other things that can describe Johanna Mason, and many of them are much better but all Annie Cresta can think is she is so tall.

She’s heard the rumours-that she and Finnick are not just friends, and maybe there is some truth. Maybe there is some white powder that made him forget the elastic band ring and the promise under the pier, and maybe there is a man with hair white as powder and a heart made of glacier ice who gets rich having people fuck.

Maybe there is truth. And maybe Johanna is part of the everything he cannot forget, that he chains around his neck, dragging along with him.  They call him son of Poseidon, old god of the ocean, but Atlas would be more fitting.

But in the day light, in the nights that he is himself, he chooses her. He chooses her to live with, with an elastic ring. Elastic is more durable then metal, it stretches to fit, and it will not break.

That’s them. They stretch and bend; but they will endure.

And if Johanna Mason is a tree, something deep rooted, growing around them; they will stretch to fit.

* * *

 

There are days, weeks- one time it was nearly three months-where he goes away, called back to the land of the untouchable, who like to watch.

Those are the hardest. Those are the days when everyone is so close, watching her like she’s about to break and they touch like spun glass.

She runs away then.

Annie runs-no one thinks of her as a runner, but a runner’s lungs and swimmer’s lungs are really just the same, and if she’s somewhere, anywhere else but their house-her house, not his, because someone fucked him there. Or maybe they didn’t fuck him, they just found him with something acidic and metallic, meant to burn his brains.

Or maybe it was the whispers of the lines, scars around his wrists, by his ankles and near his elbows.

Maybe his house was full of everything, and he couldn’t help but remember when all he wanted was to forget.

Maybe that’s why he loves her, no one remembers her and maybe it helps him forget.

But sometimes she needs to remember or maybe it’s to forget, everything blurs but she’s flat on her back in a field that she once learnt how to put her thumbs in eyes- a sure fire way to win is to blind your opponents. She’s on her back, staring at the clouds drift at glacier speeds. It’s calming. The clouds don’t give a shit about life on earth, and if there are gods, her life is of no importance because she’s not important.

She’s forgettable and now she just wants to forget.

* * *

 

Enobaria is the one who understands the most. People want to forget her as well. She won in a bloody way, too savage for the Capitol, using teeth to rip throats and bathed in blood that gurgled and splattered like rain drops.

She knows Enobaria doesn’t eat meat. That she can’t watch blood or cattle be slaughtered, that she wants to file her teeth down to the nubs, but can’t because of the image she has, even now years after her game.

So sometimes she leaves, no one really stops her from leaving District Four. She’s too far gone to be a danger, they say. She’s a Victor and that gives her freedom.

It’s a hard freedom when they think she’s insane.

But she takes it, and she makes the trip.

Enobaria meets her at the train station and holds her like she’s trying to cup an entire waterfall with her hands.

* * *

 

The best way to forget she has found is not the white powder that Finnick loves to inhale in the Capitol-it makes time go faster and he can come home quicker.

No it’s a cocktail of pills, medical names that twist and turn and she knows by heart tracing them on her skin waiting for the numb, the burning of her brain and the high.

 Benzodiazepines, triazolam, propranolol, rohypnol, histone deacetylase inhibitor; they all mix together in big pills, white pills, blue that taste bitter when she dry swallows.

She washes her friends down with whiskey and sourpuss and spends the next five hours watching the stain glass she brought Enobaria years ago refract coloured light on the kitchen cabinets.

Eventually she has to go back.  Someone needs her to help him forget.

* * *

 

Finnick’s hands are big, they know how to kill and they know how to fuck; they don’t know how to wash dishes though so he sits on the counter while she washes dishes.

‘Do you ever think we should just stop doing this?’ he asks her, staring at her so intensely she expects fire from his eyes.

‘Stop what?’ she scrapes the left over spaghetti sauce off a plate into the trash bin before dunking into the suds and hot water.

‘This,’ he says vaguely.

She wonders if he means this house-her house in deed, theirs in spirit- if dinner and dishes, and laundry and kisses and making memories and forgetting.

She keeps on washing dishes.

‘What do you mean?’ her voice is even. She doesn’t look at him.

‘It’s going to go away,’ he tells her, voice hoarse. He’s always like this when he comes back from the Capitol, bits of his soul taken and he can’t get them back and she doesn’t know how to sew him back together because she’s running out of thread and running out of her to patch him up. ‘It’s all going to go away soon; shouldn’t we just let it go now?’

She shrugs, it’s all talk and tomorrow he will hold her like he can only breathe her.

They are Victors, they are from District Four, they are in love, and they can weather this storm.

* * *

 

She doesn’t remember when she fell in love with Finnick. She should, it’s a defining moment of her life but she cannot remember.

Maybe it’s the pills, maybe it’s the fact that the summer after her games she doesn’t remember anything-trauma they say, post-traumatic stress disorder-maybe there’s a part of her that was always in love with him. Or maybe it just wasn’t important.

Maybe falling in love with Finnick is just like the tide coming in to meet the beach, inevitable and boring to watch.

Maybe it just doesn’t matter how she fell in love, but she did.

She doesn’t know.

Either way she has a ring made of elastic band around her ring that matches his.

That’s the important thing.

* * *

 

He leaves more now, there’s people who want to fuck him who can now.

She goes to Enobaria more now.

It’s hard. It’s hard maybe not him leaving but him coming back.

Because when he comes back he’s broken and twisted and he’s missing so much that she bleeds into him, steering him up with every bit of her she can. She fills him and empties herself.

And it’s bad.

It’s bad that she sometimes wants him to stay because she loves him, she loves him with the elastic ring and the dishes and the kisses and the way her heart flip flops.

It’s bad because he needs her to help him forget the Capitol, and remember who he was before he broke.

It’s bad but she’s tired and people are forgetting her but they’ll never forget him and it could be so much easier if he just stayed and she just left.

Because if she patches him with her soul, she’s got nothing left.

Sometimes she wants to forget him entirely.

* * *

 

He tells her about the revolution, a rebellion. Tells her what Haymitch has planned with District Four.

This is their chance, he tells her, to start over.

He’s wrong. He’s wrong but he’s hopeful and she can’t tell him no.

Revolution is just slaughter in the name of freedom, and the faces of the revolution-the Victors who suffered from the Capitol, Finnick chief among them-will be martyrs.

They’ll be a face blamed for the death of families, of loved one. They will be loved and cursed and wanted alive and dead.

They’ll be remembered.

* * *

 

Enobaria gives her an entire bag full of pills.

‘You need them more than me,’ she says.

She can’t disagree.

* * *

 

Johanna Mason is brave. She is brave and angry and she screams and yells as if someone is listening.

She is listening but likes she pretends she isn’t.

Johanna Mason is nothing.

She is angry and bitter and tall and she was been used by the Capitol and she thinks she is the only one who hurts the way she does.

She’s an idiot.

Her and the girl on fire, are the reason why people are dead, they don’t get it.

They don’t.

It’s unbalanced; quid pro quo, rules that are there and they fucked it up. They didn’t follow the rules and people will die, people have died.

This rebellion won’t bring peace, not when everyone who deserves it is dead.

But no one listens to her, because she’s crazy and forgettable.

Johanna Mason is screaming and she can hear Finnick’s name in her screams.

She smiles then, wild and crazy, laughing hysterically because Finnick belongs to her, she’s got her fingerprints all over his soul and he’s hers and Johanna Mason can scream all she wants for him because he never remembers that girl with the axe.

All he sees is Annie Cresta and that is all she needs.

Her laughter makes Johanna stop screaming.

She wins.

* * *

 

In their bed there’s a rule about pants, mainly no one wears them. They’re so confining and the silk sheets feel better on naked skin then between cotton.

That’s the only rule.

‘I think I love you,’ Finnick murmurs in the shell of her ear, his hands ghosting the lines of her body. ‘I think I love you and I’m afraid.’

‘Of what?’

He could say something real, of Snow, of the Games, of dying. He could say something pretentious, like oblivion, or losing her. He could say nothing. He could say anything. There are millions of words he could string together, she’s a smart woman but she can’t read minds.

‘Will you catch me?’ he asks. ‘Will you catch me because I’m falling for you and I don’t know what to do if you won’t.’

‘Always,’ she inhales his breathe.  She will spend forever catching Finnick Odair.

* * *

 

It’s easy to love a martyr, so full of visions of grandeur, and such passion to die for a cause, falling on a sword that will be forgotten.

It’s easy to love a killer when you’re a killer too-and she’s a Career, a survivor and she knows how to kill better than Finnick. So if you’re comparing, she’s more of a monster.  She knows how he knows how to read a room, find the weakest person instantly. You learn that as soon as you’re able to learn in Four.

It’s hard to love a boy who is broken in ways she’ll never understand and maybe she should give him to Johanna Mason who tells her she loves him too.

Love is not meant to be weighed and measured but it is-oh it _is_.

And she is every body of water while Johanna Mason is a drop of rain.

* * *

 

She runs out of pills.

She can’t find Enobaria because her teeth are rubbed down to the nubs.

She runs out of pills.

* * *

 

The woman is a mother and mother is one of the words she hates more than anything. Another word she hates is mutt. She also hates lizard.

Katniss is another word she hates.

The woman is a mother and she keeps her in the shower, washing grime and filth off of her and when she snarls and screams like a banshee because that works usually to get people to leave her alone, the woman just changes the water to ice cold sending a chill down her spine.

She doesn’t want to kill this woman-she’s got one daughter dead and that was the one she liked, but she’s seriously considering it as she’s dragged from the shower to the bed.

She’s ordered to sleep.

Instead she stares at the cracks on the ceiling of his house, trying to figure out where they start and where they end. If there are cracks in the foundation, they’ve just built a shoddy home, ready to fall down with the next great storm.

* * *

 

The woman doesn’t leave. She makes her breakfast-tasteless breakfast filled with grits and that needs salt-and she watches her eat.

She makes her go outside, get fresh air.

She takes care of her or tries to. No one has taken care of her since she was seventeen and they pulled her out of red water, the corneas of the last one still in her tiny fist.

She’s forgettable, unwanted but wanted. He wanted her, he loved her, he remembered her.

But there’s a difference between being loved by someone, acting as an anchor to reality and being taken care of by someone who you are more or less neutral about.

She doesn’t ask why she’s doing it.

It doesn’t matter why. It’s happening even if she says no.

She’s used to it.

* * *

 

She finds black tar pills in the bathroom, in a small plastic bag under the sink cabinet when she was looking for extra toilet paper.

It’s not her thing; no she doesn’t like those pills. She doesn’t like injections.

But it’s a lifetime without anything to make her forget.

She doesn’t do the line on the bathroom floor-she’s not a heathen or someone from a backwards district. She instead closes the cabinet and leaves the bathroom to go to the kitchen.

 She heats the heroin with a match, four of the pills in the center of a spoon. It smells like vinegar, as if she was cleaning glass. She stirs the melting pills and sucks it up with the syringe.  She sets the needle and taps the cheap plastic syringe twice.

Strong, warm arms hug her tightly to her chest.

‘You,’ she tells him, leaning back. He smells like the earth before rain, like coming home and innocence and she can feel his heat, fell his breathe and the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest. ‘You catch me I’m falling.’

* * *

 

Mrs. Everdeen finds her by a willow tree, a short distance from Finnick Odair’s house. There are needle tracts on her arms.

They will say it was a broken heart, she died in front of the grave of the man she loved and the baby boy who only lived a day.

It is an overdose.

They will lie.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Odesta Writers' Heartbreak xoxox
> 
> This turned out differently from how I expected, but it works both ways. You can read the way I was intending with Finnick and Jr. dead all along and this is her dealing with it. OR just the way she falls apart.
> 
> Much love to my lovely partners in crimes for decided yeah, this is going to be fun. Let's break hearts.


End file.
